Monday, February 27, 2012

Henry Llewellyn Williams: a Literary Pirate

by John Adcock

The first time I came across the name Henry Llewellyn
Williams was eight years ago, in December, while reading old letters in bound
volumes of the New York Times Literary
Supplement for 1904. Williams was a frequent contributor and wrote florid
letters on Sherlock Holmes, Edward Lloyd, Bracebridge Hemyng, Paul Féval and
Sweeney Todd. He had a keen interest in cheap literature, and more, he hinted
at personal first-hand knowledge of the doings of publishers and authors of
nineteenth century Fleet Street.

Because of his gossipy, gregarious style of writing I had
doubts about the veracity of Williams stories. In a letter written from Pearl
River, New York, for instance, Williams passed on an intriguing story about
Edward Lloyd and his running trade in timely novelization of popular stage
melodrama:

“Lloyd was a stout, ruddy,
round-headed Englishman, a Panks (*character from Dickens’s Little Dorrit), full of activity, and
his work mapped out clearly in his solid head. He would interrupt the chat to
speak through tubes to the author, printer, and publishing office from his
chair, as in “How is Paul and the Press
Gang going?” and communicate instructions from the reply: “Tell Mr. Scribe
to keep Paul Pressgang four numbers
ahead,” or, “Scribe, just wind up Pressgang
in two issues and get on with The Dumb
Boy of Manchester -- the play is a hit at the Adelphi”

This story seemed a bit fishy at the time, but -- on 25 Mar
2004 Bill Blackbeard posted the following on the Bloods & Dimes website:

“For the record, my shelves hold
a bound volume of a French sensational lit mag yclept Causes Celebres de Tous les Peuples. Dated 1849 and apparently a
complete run in 452 pp., the London Journal-sized pub features short (10-25
pp.) accounts of actual notorious crimes and criminals, all illustrated by
effective and generally restrained illos, maps, diagrams of crime scenes, etc.
On pages 149-156, one of the books shorter accounts is unpretentiously titled
“Pierre Miquelon et Barnabe Cabard.” These two gentlemen apparently have a taste
for good human flesh, and since Cabard is a barber by profession, he does in
salubrious customers by cutting their throats in the barber’s chair.”

Bill B.’s find solved a mystery that had plagued penny
dreadful researchers and aficionados for over a century -- to wit, the original
source of the London Sweeney Todd
legend (Todd’s name first appeared in
James Malcolm Rymer’s String of Pearls;
or, the Sailor’s Gift). On 23 June 2006 I found a corroboration of Bill
Blackbeard’s post in a New York Times
book supplement letter (17 Sept 1904) by Henry Llewellyn Williams, followed by
another mention, in a different letter (on Ghost Stories16, April 1904,
“founded on a Paris legend”) by the same author. Williams wrote on Sweeney Todd under the title “The
Publisher Lloyd”:

“As has here been pointed out,
the story is based on a Parisian medieval legend that a barber supplied the
“meat” for a neighboring pie-man.”

So perhaps there was some reliability in the many seemingly
tall-tales told by Williams after all. I stashed my photocopies in a box and
forgot about Williams until recently, when I found an article that knocked my
socks off. I was to find that Henry
Llewellyn Williams, using a variety of pseudonyms (Henry L. Boone, Mat Mizzen
and surely others), was one of the most astoundingly prolific transatlantic
hack-writers of his time, perhaps of all time, and had been consigned to the
graveyard of cheap literature. Williams was the author of city mysteries, dime
novels, yellowbacks, westerns, and sea stories. The aforesaid article appeared
in the New York Dramatic Mirror in
May 1883 under the title A QUEER BUSINESS EXPOSED, and its subject was Henry
Llewellyn Williams. It began:

“Among the advertisements in
the amusement columns of the New York Herald on Sunday, May 13, was the
following:

FEDORA. -- AN ENGLISH (ACTING)
TRANS-lation of this French play will be furnished at a moderate price. Address
L. W., 176 Herald offices.

As Fanny Davenport purchased
the play of Fedora in Paris some time since from the author, Victorien Sardou,
for a good round sum, and as no other legitimate sale of an English
translation, to be used on American territory, could be made, THE MIRROR was
convinced that “L. W.’s” offer to sell a copy of the drama savored of piracy,
if not downright fraud, and its emissaries were given instructions to sift the
matter to the bottom. Some detective work was therefore arranged. On scented
note-paper, and in a feminine hand, the following letter, signed by a purely
fictitious name, and dated from an address obtained for the purpose, was mailed
to the Herald Advertiser.”

It was a long letter, signed by “Mary L. Brotherton,” and
hinted that she had “thousands of dollars” and would be prepared to pay “a very
liberal price for the translated play.” A meeting was arranged, and, one month
later, an intrepid reporter arrived at the door of “a respectable-looking four
story house” at 103 Henry Street in Brooklyn, “about two blocks off Fulton Street
and not far from Fulton Ferry.”

Mr. Williams was not at home but his daughter sat the
reporter to wait in a “comfortably furnished parlor, the walls of which were
hung with theatrical and sporting prints.” Williams never showed and the
reporter wheedled the following information from the unsuspecting daughter:

“He is to be found at 33 Rose
Street -- DeWitt’s publishing house -- where they print plays: or you might
find him at the Mercury office, as he
writes for the Sunday Mercury.”

The reporter hurried to De Witt’s Rose Street establishment
at “a short, crooked thoroughfare” known as “the Swamp,” and meeting with no
success, also tried the Mercury
offices, again to no avail. The scribe kept trying and finally Williams wrote
and set up a meeting at DeWitt’s offices, which was kept:

“H. L. Williams is a stout,
elderly gentleman, with bushy side-whiskers and moustache, and grey hair. He
dresses severely in black. He has a restless furtive eye, which scarcely looked
the reporter in the face.

Mr. Williams said that he
worked for the Sunday Mercury and
read stories and corrected manuscripts for them. He went on to say: “I can
furnish you an original translation of Fedora inside of thirty days. My son,
who does the work, is now in London, where he has resided for the past sixteen
years, during which time he has copied all the prominent foreign successes that
have appeared, both in London and Paris…my son has written a good many plays in
the form of stories, as you can see by this list, which you may keep for
reference. He made a serial of Fedora, which has appeared in the Sunday Mercury… then his stories are
bound up in this style” -- showing several pamphlets the size of Lovell’s Library, which would sell for
twenty-five or thirty cents.”

Terms were discussed: Williams was to receive a deposit of
fifty dollars, on receipt of which he would order a translated manuscript of
Fedora from his son in England, and a further fifty on delivery. After three
months a further one hundred dollars would be paid “as a matter of honor and
your sense of justice,” if the undercover reporter was satisfied the play was a
success. The reporter departed, saying he would submit the terms to Mary L.
Brotherton. The Mirror then gives
details of Williams “list” of plays and other works:

The list given him by Williams
is headed: ‘List of Works, original, adapted, translated by Henry Llewellyn
Williams, Dramatist, Author, Theatrical, Musical and Literary Critic,
Publishers’ and Theatre Managers’ Correspondent; Translator from the French,
German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, etc., etc.’ Nearly fifty English
and other foreign papers and magazines are referred to as containing articles
by Williams fils. He claims
connection with the following American publications:

There followed a long list of translated plays of which I
only mention a few: Dumas, Dumas fils,
Hugo -- Notre Dame, Les Miserables
(fragmentary), Sue -- Mysteres de Paris,
Juif Errant (two versions), Feuillet, Aimard -- Loi de Lynch, Trappeurs d’Arkansas, Gaborieu, Lecocq, Zola and
Murger. Also included was a long list of dramas, comedies, operas and
operettas, pantomimes, burlesques and farces.

The list concludes with the
statement that “the result in print is 77,711 pages of manuscript since 1861,
although during that time 977 places of amusement have been visited in the Old
and New Worlds by the writer.”

That ended the article. I found little information about the
author except for a few references to his being born in 1842 (with no
citation). Williams Sr. claimed his son first saw print in 1861, which would
have made him nineteen at the time (if the birth date is correct), and
forty-three at the time of the Mirror
reporter’s sting in 1883. Much of the information can be verified; I found
numerous writings in the Clipper bylined
“Henry Llewellyn Williams” (although much later, in 1893), and Bob Brierly; or, the Ticket-of-Leave Man
was published by Robert M. DeWitt in 1867, under the byline “Henry L. Williams
Jr.” Most likely both father and son were hacks, perhaps in partnership, and
both made frequent trips between London and New York.

Further back, in 1859, the Albany Evening Journal wrote of Williams Sr. “of Brooklyn, County of
Kings, and formerly of Nassau Street and Ann Street, printer and publisher”
applying for a discharge from debt. Nassau and Ann Street were in “the Swamp,”
where DeWitt and most cheap publishers of the fifties and sixties had their offices.
In 1846 Osgood Bradbury’s Belle of the
Bowery was published by H. L. Williams and in 1868 we find a copy of White Phantom, a Romance, by Miss
Braddon, published at 12 North William Street, NY, by H. L. Williams. Again --
a Maxwell connection.

John Maxwell (Miss Braddon’s husband) began by publishing The Welcome Guest which he had purchased
from Henry Vizitelly. He was the proprietor of the London Halfpenny Journal which was issued by Ward & Lock from 158
Fleet Street. Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s mother Fanny was the editor. The
periodical commenced 1 July 1861 with a serial called The Black Band; or, The Mysteries of Midnight (pirated in America
by Hilton & Co.), written by Miss Braddon under the pen-name ‘Lady Caroline
Lascelles.’ Among the other contributor’s were Margaret Blount, WilliamStephens Hayward and Percy B. St. John. The story paper ran to 245 nos. before
being incorporated with The London Herald
and English Girl’s Journal on 10 Mar
1866.

The Athenaeum No.
3282 (20 Sept 1890) gives a further glimpse into the Williams/Maxwell
connection under the heading AMERICAN PUBLISHERS AND BRITISH AUTHORS. Miss M.
E. Braddon wrote a “card” to the Athenaeum
accusing the New YorkMercury of printing a story “founded on
the melodrama of “The Secret witness” that she had not written under her name.
W. Cauldwell of the Mercury responded
that the “novelette was purchased by me several years ago, from Mr. Henry L.
Williams, a well-known littérateur then,
if not now, in the employ of your husband Mr. Maxwell…” He goes on to say that
the “father of Mr. Williams, since dead, was in my employ as a reader at the
time, and when he brought me the story I had every reason to think it had met
your approbation.”

“You complain that upwards of
fifty of your stories have been used on this side of the Atlantic without
recompense to you. This may be true, for the so-called “Library” publishers
here are as great pirates in the matter of the productions of English writers
as are the cheap publication houses on your side of the ocean in regard to the
works of American authors.”

Braddon fired back that Cauldwell “ignores his sin of
commission in the shape of a flaming paragraph which announced ‘Tiger Head; or,
the Ghost of the Avalanche,’ as a new and original story by M. E. Braddon: a
statement hardly consistent with the knowledge that the manuscript had been
sold to him by the adapter -- in more than one sense -- of the drama, and
ostensibly as an adaptation.”

Braddon next criticized Williams style: “That a vamped-up
story, in which a thin thread of dialogue -- from a drama written fifteen years
ago, chiefly with a view to scenic display -- meanders through the wide expanse
of Williams eloquence, should be preferred by the readers of the New York Mercury to a novel carefully
thought out and carefully written for serial publication argues some
eccentricity of taste on their part; while the resemblance in style between Mr.
Williams work and mine is a point upon which I would invite the judgment of my
American readers. I do not myself admit that resemblance.”

From this it can be gleaned that the voluminous letter
writer to the New York Times in 1904
was Henry Llewellyn Williams Jr., and that his father had passed on between
1883 and 1890. Although Williams often burst into penny-a-liner hyperbole there
was much of interest in these letters. A letter published 20 Aug 1904 is titled
“Henry Llewellyn Williams’s Reminiscences of the Famous Old English House of
Lloyd,” and seems to be based on Junior’s fathers’ recollections. “A relative,
publishing in Boston and New York at the time, pictured his calls on the great
popular publisher at Shoreditch…” It seems that Williams senior met with Lloyd
in person in the fifties. Llewellyn Jr. writes of Lloyd’s woodcuts:

“As Lloyd’s News succeeded, and
authors left him, his obsolete books became mere metal and piles of woodcuts. I
say cuts, for some of the illustrations to his first books were like Tudor
blocks, done with the woodcutter’s drawing knives, not gravers! Yet they were
copied here with the text -- see DeWitt’s “Claude Duval,” which had a long sale
until Munro killed it with a ten-cent edition. Frank Leslie made a bid for
them, and DeWitt would have bought what he had not reprinted; but it was all
the lot or none with Lloyd. The blocks have fed the engine furnace and the
plates have been transmuted into the linotype for the Chronicle and the News.”
(Most of Williams Times letters are
available for reading at Google News Archives).

One final note: I found the following Williams article on
London’s cheap literature of the sixties titled THE BRADDON-MAXWELL BOOK-MAKING
FACTORY, from The Writer, Vol. V.
No.2, Boston, February 1891. There are a few mistakes, for instance, WilliamSawyer did not “start Funny Folks,” he was the editor, but all-in-all the
article is full of interesting (and baffling) material on sensation fiction:

“They say Thackeray inaugurated
the fair evil heroine, but Miss Braddon is generally credited with mothering
the Girl With the Yellow Hair, whom “Ally Sloper” Ross and the flippant writers
kept alive for thirty years. “Lady Audley’s” tresses drew Miss Braddon from
hackwork, but the factory went on. Her confreres, however, also soared.”

The novelization of popular plays was carried on from the
earliest days of the unstamped press by publishers of radical newspapers and
the penny blood publishers. The bulk of Lloyd, Purkess and Vickers play-novels
were probably written by the same authors as the bloods. Henry Llewellyn
Williams wrote novelizations and translations for numerous publishers, among
them; New York: Robert M. DeWitt (1865), Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Co.
(1871), London: General Publishing Co. (1888), London: Dean & Son (1897),
and Shurmer Sibthorp (1902).

MAY 1862 Advertisment

***

Following is a list of some of the writings of Henry
Llewellyn Williams from COPAC’s catalogue (selected from some 300 plus titles),
many of Williams books can be read online at Open Library, Internet Archive,
Google Books and Project Gutenberg:

1874 The American War,
Cartoons by Matt Morgan and other English artists, with illustrative notes by
H. L. Williams, United States, London, Chatto & Windus.

1884 Adventures Among
the Arabs, the boy of the Gatling Battery and the War Tiger of the Soudan,
London: International Publishing Offices. 15 p. (British Library)

1884 All About Sarah
“Barnum” Bernhardt, her loveys, her doveys, her capers, and her funniments,
London: International Publishing Offices. 15 p. (British Library)

1884 The Adventurous
Life and Daring Exploits in England and America, of captain Matthew Webb, the
Swimming Champion of the World, his Boyhood, Rescues, Crossing the Channel,
Natatorial Feats, and Terrible Death in the Whirlpool’s of Niagara, compiled
from authentic sources by Henry Llewellyn Williams, London: E.
Smith, 8 p.

1887 Buffalo Bill, the
Hon. W. F. Cody, a full account of his life with the origin of his “Wild West”
show, Henry Llewellyn Williams, London, Glasgow, New York: G. Routledge
& Sons, 1887, 193 p.

2 comments:

Hi John,H.L. Williams Sr. of Boston was a prolific publisher of J. H. Ingraham in book form (1845-46). He was also an editor associated with his brother's story newspapers Uncle Sam (1841-?) and The Yankee (1843-?). He moved to NYC sometime around 1850 and launched his own Yankee (1851-?) there. Looks like his son was a chip off the old block.Rich West

There is a copy of a letter from H. L. Williams to Arnold D. Taylor, executor and brother of the dramatist Tom Taylor, written from 35 Newman Street, London on 17 Jan 1882 in the National Art Library archives, Blythe House THM/223/2/3/1/7.Written on the back of a 'List of works original, adapted and translated by Henry Llewellyn Williams, Dramatist, Author, Theatrical, Musical and Literary Critic; Publishers and Theatre Managers correspondent; Translator frorm the French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese etc.

the letter claims that Tom Taylor had previously given Williams permission to publish his 'Ticket of Leave Man' and 'The Serf'. He asks permission to use Taylor's 'The Fool's revenge'as the basis of a penny book

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Cartoonist, illustrator, storyteller, born in Nelson, B.C. in May 1950, has contributed to Chronicle, Weirdom, and Visions fanzines. John illustrated ‘Ronald and the Dragon’ by Lawrie Peters in 1975. Email: adcock34@gmail.com